We talked to Welley Neto, Operations Coordinator at Goomer, about how they implemented automation at a crucial juncture while pivoting from a restaurant ordering system to a delivery app. Today, they have over 200 n8n workflows running in production. Learn about why Welley believes that low-code/no-code applications are becoming a market standard.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

My name is Welley Neto. I have been working for Goomer for the past five years, mostly as CSOps, an area where we focus on dedicated customer success operations.

We work to provide an efficient way for all teams to communicate. This communication is crucial when the customers move through the following path: marketing team, sales team, onboarding, and customer success. Our goal is that our customers can have a seamless experience during this process.

Goomer used to be a restaurant ordering system. Due to COVID-19, all the restaurants closed in Brazil. We ended up creating a delivery app, and all of our processes had to change as our product and needs had changed.

I have been working on automating these processes. We adopted n8n as our primary tool for doing this.

What made you decide that n8n would be the most suitable tool for you?

I have tried Zapier and Microsoft Flow before. Both are decent tools, but they lack the flexibility that we needed. Some services that we use are not available with these tools, and we have to add customizations on our end. Doing that manually for all the services became cumbersome quickly.

We are not a DevOps team, and our engineers are focused on delivering product updates. We cannot rely on software engineers to create our automation or deploy our tools.

When it comes to pricing, these tools become increasingly expensive, very fast. Free tiers were consumed in less than a week while testing, and we were running short on cash with the recent changes. So we could not afford these tools. That is where n8n came into play.

n8n was perfect for us. We took only a few minutes from our DevOps team to set up, and we were able to self-host it. With predictable pricing in place, all we had to account for was server pricing. Also, being able to deploy it in our network allowed us to easily connect to databases and internal services without the hassle of tunnels, keys, and permissions.

Being able to easily deploy new workflows without having to wait for the DevOps team greatly improved our speed.

What kind of workflows are you building with n8n?

I feel very proud of this workflow. Take a look.

This little guy does a lot of magic for us!

It starts when we win a deal and gets recorded in our CRM. We check the zip code to make sure that it’s correct. We then store address information and start feeding this data into all our internal services like billing, accounting, reporting, and onboarding. All this is possible with one workflow!

The great thing about n8n is that I can empower my whole team. All repetitive tasks are becoming n8n workflows. We have created over 200 workflows till now.

We are learning that everything can be automated and that n8n is the core for all of this.

I am also helping our team with creating a data warehouse and moving large volumes of data from a place to another. Using n8n to connect APIs for creating complex workflows and connecting systems is just awesome! At Goomer, we have been releasing a new ETL process every week, and it is only possible because of n8n.

Last but not least, n8n is helping us switch tools. We recently adopted a new CRM. Being able to move our customer base, leads, products, and all the data using n8n saved us a lot of time.

Which integrations have you been using the most?

We are working with Airtable, Coda, Hubspot, GraphQL, Cron, and a few others, but the node I use mostly is the HTTP Request. It is one of n8n’s core nodes. It provides so much power and flexibility that I can use it to connect to services that n8n does not have a node for, like our billing and accounting systems. The cool thing is that we asked in the community forums for an improvement to the Coda node, and it got updated in less than a week. The n8n team rocks! 🤘

I asked in the community forums for an improvement to the Coda node, and it got updated in less than a week.

We are also using the webhook methods to create endpoints in n8n to trigger internal workflows coming from other systems.

What’s the most useful feature of n8n for you?

Every tool we pick to use at Goomer needs a triad of information: data, processes, and automation. Deploying a new software that we just bought can be easy at first, but without this triad, the software becomes useless as adoption cannot be complete.

n8n allows us to feed new tools with data, establish processes on how this tool communicates with other tools in our ecosystem, and integrate this tool completely, automating processes.

For example, software without data requires users to query for information somewhere else. That quickly becomes a hassle as there needs to be a duplication of data, with risks of manual errors and inconsistency. Regarding the process, we have to make sure that every new tool is useful and compatible with our current methods. It has to become a natural part of our working environment. When it comes to automation, any action we do has to have consequences. It needs to trigger a business process, notify someone, send an invoice or update a report.

We can tie all of these together using n8n easily by connecting APIs with our own rules.

Any new tool or software that we decide to use and contains an API can easily fit our process. We don’t need super coding skills. Being able to read the docs and send a few HTTP Requests is a key skill for our team members.

That is very important because there are API updates, new requirements, scaling, and all this has to go back to our dev team. With n8n, we can just do it ourselves by consuming third party APIs with minimum time to deploy.

What advice do you have for people looking to incorporate n8n in their teams or projects?

The CSOps team needs to act fast. n8n is the perfect way to achieve this. We cannot stop or delay major product features to integrate a new CRM or a marketing tag. The development roadmap is always tight, so we cannot always count on the DevOps team. Independence can only be achieved with the right tools, and n8n has become a core part of our autonomy.

It’s not about just creating or deploying something. It’s all about maintaining it. You have to keep this in mind: maintainability is crucial. That is an endless job.

How do you envision using n8n in the near future?

Our goal is to have all of our Ops team using n8n to solve all issues they might have. Any small process that is manual or repetitive and can be automated will be. Just like Hubspot helps our team in many ways, n8n will do so too.

Processes like data ingestion, software integration, customer success workflows can and should be automated.

What’s a feature that you are looking forward to or would love to see in n8n?

I would like to first thank you for the updates on the nodes we requested and the possibility to throttle requests for the HTTP Request node. These were things we wanted, and you already delivered, so thank you!

There’s always room for improvement. 🙂

Something I would like to have is workflow organization. We have over 200 workflows, so tagging or folders could be helpful. Having user control access would be great as well.

One last thing I would love to see is a separation between core nodes and regular nodes. The n8n core nodes are really useful, and I would like to know them better and easily identify them.

Any parting words for our readers?

Working with low-code/no-code applications is becoming a market standard. It’s the new “Office suite” in resumes. Being able to understand API documentation, how to interact with it, and explore resources is becoming valuable. It’s something we’re looking for when hiring new people. No-code/low-code is the future.

n8n users come from a wide range of backgrounds, experience levels, and interests. We have been looking to highlight different users and their projects in our blog posts. If you’re working with n8n and would like to inspire the community, contact us 💌